Posts tagged with "Vladimir Kagan":

"I think that with good furniture, if it doesn’t at some point make you want to make love on it, it’s missing something," property magnet André Balazs said recently to the New York Times. He was of course talking about his chair, a Vladimir Kagan chair, complete with “sensuously curved legs” to be precise.
With Monroe and Cooper chalked up as buyers, Kagan's works have garnered a reputation for refined elegance and graceful style. Other works have now come into the ownership of other notbales including Brad Pitt, Demi Moore, Angelina Jolie, Uma Thurman, and Tom Cruise, among others.
Unlike his father, who abided by a process of precision and strict rules of measurement, Kagan preferred the more liberating trial and error approach. Perhaps this is why he went on to set up his own business. The results of which, it must be said, were far more fruitful.
“I was not well suited to being a good cabinetmaker. I was too impatient, impulsive,” he said. “My father always said to me, ‘Vladi, measure three times and cut once.’ And I would cut three times without bothering to measure....But I was damn good at conceptual ideas.”
Speaking of his inspirations, he said “I had a lot of exposure to good, modern design.”Kagan says he developed a firm sense of likes and dislikes in his early years. He condemned Italian furniture as “baroque, over the top, unjustifiable” while the opposing Scandinavian designs were too "industrial" for his liking.
In 2009, after 62 years of producing furniture, he was inducted in the Interior Designer Hall of Fame. In 2013, and at the age of 85, he announced he was expanding his business (despite subscribing to the philosophy of less is more). Speaking to the Financial Times that year, he said “I’m supposed to be a minimalist – I’m a maximalist. So I say, ‘Do as I say, not as I do.’”

It was announced in July of 2014 (very quietly evidently) that Zaha Hadid had been commissioned to design a new headquarters for real estate/oil and gas conglomerate The Richland Companies in Houston. Why had we not heard about this? Well, thanks to Vladimir Kagan, we are now in the know!
The legendary furniture designer not only tipped AN off about the commission, he was also responsible for introducing Ms. Hadid to Suzanne Klein and Edna Meyer-Nelson, the Richland execs who promptly hired the Pritzker Prize winner to plan their mixed-use HQ. No design has been released yet, but we’ll be waiting with bated breath to see what sort of swooping, eccentric forms Zaha cooks up for the project—that is, unless falling oil prices put a lid on this baby before it’s hatched!